May 2007

The mysterious new Palm mobile device we referred to in our iPhone 2 story yesterday has finally been revealed - it's a an ultra-compact laptop computer designed to sync with the Palm Treo and other smartphones. Palm's calling it Foleo.

At 1.1 kilograms it's half the size of a standard laptop, but still similar in size to the smallest models already on the market. The free open-source Linux was chosen as the operating system, as opposed to the usual Windows.

This is not a new topic of course. It provoked furious debate across the blogosphere and in the media last month after an American blogger, Kathy Sierra, received what some people called death threats from an anonymous poster. Tim O'Reilly, the person said to have coined the term Web 2.0, and Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales recently proposed a draft bloggers' code of conduct that they hope will serve as a guideline for blogging.

Motorola and Optus recently announced they were joining U2 frontman Bono's "(PRODUCT) RED" campaign, promising to give almost $20 to the Global Fund for every (PRODUCT) RED MOTORAZR V3 phone bundle they sold.

The $249 bundles must be bought through Optus and come with a Motorola H500 Bluetooth headset.

While they're the first in Australia, Motorola and Optus join other companies such as Apple, Converse, Emporio Armani and American Express, all of which have committed to donating a portion of revenue generated from certain products to African AIDS programs.

Although it doesn't seem to have made much progress to date, the Australian video games industry has stepped up its efforts to convince the Government to introduce an R18+ classification for video games.

But even in the face of new research suggesting most Australian gamers are adults, not to mention the fact that all of the new games platforms include parental locks, I don't think we'll see the classification laws change any time soon.

It appears cyber terrorism has graduated from the realms of science fiction novels and scare-mongering current affairs programs.

Following a $73.6 million commitment in last week's federal budget to improve the nation's capacity to manage cyber attacks, the Government is now warning providers of Australia's essential services (i.e. electricity, gas, water, sewerage, transport and communications utilities) that their computer systems are outdated and vulnerable to cyber terrorist attacks.

The threat is so serious that the Government is holding free workshops for critical infrastructure practitioners and executives next month designed to teach them about emerging threats and how to treat them.

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